pickledcherries

Inside Fukushima - Photo Gallery - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

2011-12-02T12:24:00.000+11:00

Inside Fukushima - Photo Gallery - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

The Record of Time

2011-11-27T22:04:00.009+11:00

The picture above is the record of the sunlight at 2.30 pm every Fridays from April 1 to June 17, 2011 before the winter solstice. Some Fridays were cloudy, so I didn’t record them. The aperture of the sunlight is the top window on the right hand side of the picture.

Below, I recorded the sunlight on July 22, 2011 at 2pm, 2.30pm, 3pm and 3.30pm. From recording the position of sunlight in both directions, I can roughly estimate where the sunlight would be if it’s cloudy. But the best way to set up the reflectors for Orbit is to do the day before the performance particularly if it’s sunny. Then again if the day before is cloudy too, this recordings help.

Please click on the images to enlarge.

Floor Plan of "Orbit"

2011-01-05T10:37:00.008+11:00

Please click on the image to enlarge.

Fascinating...

2010-11-12T10:35:00.006+11:00

This piece has to make an appearance on my blog!

Veronique Doisneau may never be a star, but working with Jerome Bel, she might have found the most precious moment in her long career. She retired at 42...

Furoshiki - Clever and Stylish

2010-11-04T12:09:00.004+11:00

I've been looking for large bags I can take all my stuff in. Most overnight or bowling bags are expensive and the bags themselves are quite heavy. Not least, sometimes they come with excessively large buttons and padlocks with no use for, which even add more weight to. Then I'd like a bag that I can fold in my smaller bag when I don't use it.

Enter furoshiki. It's a sort of origami of bags. And of course, it's stylish and clever at the same time.

Let the scientists have their say...

2010-08-17T22:04:00.005+10:00

During this boring election campaign, you've heard about people who have no clue about "election issues", those swinging voters who decide the election. Funny that!

The video above would go well with ABC radio program "Culture Wars at CSIRO", which you can down load audio and listen to this program...

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2010/2977740.htm#t

Brilliant scientists at the CSIRO (let's get it's full name: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) have done so much for decades but we don't know that much about it. Come election time, they're the one who know what's going on about climate change, new crops of wheat, looking in the blackhole and invent the WiFi, what to do with volcanic ash, etc. But yet again, we still don't hear much from them. They're not allow to give opinions about new policies from the Government or Opposition for the ethical reasons.

Then yet again, the people who know the data and the science are not the ones who make the policies. The enormous capacity of the CSIRO goes on understated. Had people in the country taken their concerns and consulted the CSIRO (the government funded projects are public property), their livelihood would improve. They could make an informed decision about what to do. That's what science does: find/invent ways to survive.

But then again they may have to change their way of thinking, living and doing things. And I think, my friends, is not what they want to do. They became burried in the 19th century way of living and operating. The leaderships in this country doesn't help either. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott only catch on sound bites as if thinking that their voters are so dump that couldn't get their heads around complex issues beyond their back pockets. Or maybe most voters are just that..

If you think about for example the science of climate change, perhaps think when Galileo presented his theory to the Vatican that the Earth is round and Gravity exists, how much hell he's got into. Scientists often get into trouble because of things they find out. I have a bit of hope that the science of climate change would be gradually absorbed into the mainstream media and people who are suckers for the sound bites from politicians.

Unfortunately, there may be some catastrophes happen before they get it, like Black Saturday in Victoria (Feb 7, 2009) and currently the heatwave and bushfires in Russia and the major floods in Pakistan (right now 2010). In the future? Probably worse and more often...

Popcorn Crazy

2010-06-23T15:46:00.001+10:00

The invisible energy as your mobile is ringing, revealed by the popcorn!

An inspiration...

2010-06-14T02:24:00.005+10:00

I decide to have something nicer on my blog. More football? Oh, soccer is so boring like watching your toe nails grow.

Then I thought of the passing of Kazuo Ono, one of the founders of Butoh, at the age of 103. Ono inspired me. I saw a footage of him dancing a "dance of Argentina" about 10 years ago. He's already 93 then. He's amazing, fragile but very powerful.

Can you imagine dancing well in your 90s? I'd love to be able to do that....

Football of all codes... part 2

2010-06-10T14:28:00.004+10:00

Ever heard of the LFL? Well, here it is. I'm sure the boys will enjoy it. But I'm not sure if it's just me or some women don't realise they're exploited.

It's not my idea of Friday night football. I'm trying not to be judgemental here. Women's sports is fun to watch. But in lingerie? Maybe some people get something mixed up here.

The Age has got an interesting article about it here.

Football (of All Codes) One Saturday Evening in Melbourne

2010-06-06T13:08:00.009+10:00

Southern Cross Station (photo by lachlansear)

I've been commuting by train from Southern Cross Station to Footscray and back in the past 4 months. I use the studio space at Victoria University for my rehearsals on Friday and Saturday. With teaching work and course sessions to attend, by Saturday evening I'm usually exhausted. But at the same time, it's exhilarating as the train approach Southern Cross Station, it'd pass Etihad Stadium which will be well lit ready for one of the AFL football matches for the weekend. I'd know who'd playing by how the football fans on the train dress and often strike up a conversation with them. Often they're not barracking for my team but we'll always have friendly enough to say about mutual appreciation for football. Southern Cross is a buzzing place on the weekend.

This Saturday on my tram home to Collingwood, a Melbourne fan (in a trench coat and Melbourne scarf) got up on the tram and sat next to a young lady who sat opposite to me. The young lady was listening to her iPod at first but when she turned around and saw his scarf, she said to him, "Another lost?"

He: "Yeah.. It's like a different team from last week, you know. All of a sudden they got scared by bloody Carlton!"

She: "You never know, don't you?"

He: "Who are you supporting?"

She: "Melbourne. My boyfriend supports Carlton."

He: "It's like a long-standing marriage, you know, being a club supporter. You have to go with it through thick and thin. When you win, it's great. When you lose, you have to be philosophical about it that football goes around and come around. But that's why we love football, you know? You'd never know what you'd get each week. The ups and down. We've got a lot of exciting young players but they didn't fire up today. You have to give them time. They (Carlton) have this man named Chris Judd that can do anything in the world. He's amazing. But we're not like Collingwood or Western Bulldogs or Hawthorne that are really critical to their teams, you know. It's like there's a lot of love and understanding around the (Melbourne) club. The only thing is that a lot of paid members of Melbourne Football Club aren't really going to our games. They just spend Saturday or Sunday afternoon doing their garden, you know? I've got to go to an opera after this so... That's life in Melbourne on the weekend, you know, going to the football then the opera..."

She: "I've got to get off at this stop. Enjoy the opera and hopefully we have a win next week."

He: "Have a great evening, darling."

This is what the coach of the Socceroos Dutchman Pim Verbeek doesn't understand. He's miffed that prior to the World Cup farewell match between Australia and New Zealand, the Socceroos couldn't train everyday at the MCG. He's got to be mad. He didn't understand that soccer, the world No 1 game, must defer to the AFL. You bet. There're so many AFL teams whose home grounds are the MCG. Melbourne, population under 5 million, has 9 AFL teams based here, only one soccer team and one NRL team. You don't see the picture, do you, Pim? We built a brand new rectangular stadium with a nice bubble roof for soccer and the NRL. If you aren't happy about that, Pim, you can rack off.

the new AAMI Park Stadium (photo by Luke Tscharke)

Not that we're not supporting our Socceroos. But our draw is tough your know. The first game is with Germany... Well, Germany has 10 or 12 players in the world's top 100. We have one: Mark Schwarzer at no. 100! It's not immediate sudden death but it won't help with the grumpy coach either. And all of this will be complicated by the altitude issue in South Africa. Check out an excellent article on the altitude factor during the 2010 World Cup in the New Scientist here.

There're things that Australia gives a shit about the world, there're things that it doesn't. Football is something we don't give a shit about the world. Because our AFL football is more superior than any other codes. It's frustrating to watch the whole game of soccer and it's rare to have more than say 5 or 6 goals kicked. Even the marquee players of the NRL like Karmichael Hunt and Israel Falau has abandoned their codes for the AFL. If you don't understand this fact, Pim Verbeek.... Actually we don't care that much that you don't understand, Pim. Our AFL will go on for 26 weekends per year without you! Ciao!

why can't we be happy with ourselves?

2010-05-26T10:59:00.002+10:00

This funny video might help... Enjoy!

How to Eat "Pho"

2010-05-21T21:12:00.006+10:00

pho

I had a flu last week and am still fighting the residue of it. So this afternoon after my studio session at Victoria University, I felt like "pho" - Vietnamese noodle soup with chicken or beef stock base for its nutritional punch. Being in Footscray where VU is, I decided to explore the main street of the suburb out of curiosity.

Having lived in Melbourne for more than 15 years, I don't really know Footscray as I didn't usually have anything to do with it until now. So I just walked straight to Nicholson Street which ends at the VU campus I go to.

The Nicholson St Mall, near Footscray train station is a buzzing place. What I noticed first was the mixture of lots of Asian faces and Africans of all colours and sizes. It's quite peculiar that shops named like "Ngoc Tan" sit alongside an African cafe with yellow-green-red flags all over the shop (could be Ethiopian or Ghanaian.) A bit of history: Footscray became a settlement for Vietnamese immigrants in the 70s, Middle Eastern immigrants after the first Iraq war and more recently African immigrants. After strolling for a while, I actually notice people from all over the world: Eastern Europeans, Italians, French, what have you, and indeed plain white Aussies. It's also because Footscray's got two big campuses of VU in the suburb, so the mix of all immigrants there're overseas students hanging around in the Mall as well. I saw one African guy walked by. He'd be about 6'2" at least, tall and slim, wearing an all white suit with a white tie. He's such a head turner. He looked fantastic.

Then I found a pho shop that looked pretty good called "Saigon Pho" with just a simple menu. They only serve noodle soup and rice. And the shop didn't smell like carcasses like some other pho shops. Come to think of it, when you eat pho, you eat a full-on carcass of an animal, either a cow or a chicken. Not only meat, the muscles, it's also the ligaments, soft tissue bits and liver. In a way, it's a tradition of cuisine that, once an animal is killed, they don't waste very much of it. They use parts of the animal as much as they can.

I ordered noodle soup chicken stock base with special combination with one of the waiters. Then a couple of minutes later, the other waiter came over and asked me if I was aware of what's in it. (Uh-oh!) I said no. So the waiter said it's got chicken in it, of course, and also brisket and chicken liver. The waiter offered to get me all chicken but I thought for a second and decided to have a go at it. I don't mind chicken liver in the soup but the brisket? I'll see how I go. It's not quite a crowd-pleasing dish as I imagined.

Every noodle soup dish comes with a full plate of bean sprouts, herbs, a bit of chilli and lemon. I've got just Thai basil for the herb, but never mind. Mint and Vietnamese mint as well might've been nice, I thought. The chicken meat and liver was very nice. Then the brisket. I'm not quite sure about it. The texture of the brisket felt like a cross between meat and elastic ban. It's a stringy soft tissue part near the rib cage of the cow. My brain couldn't help but going through all the cow anatomy where the brisket actually is! (Oh, stop it!)

But what made the dish so nice is the herb, bean sprouts, chilli and lemon. It really made the experience of eating chicken carcass much more pleasurable, exactly what I was looking for. What's more, had I chosen to have just chicken in my soup, it wouldn't have the edge as both chicken and liver. Very happy.

As for the brisket, I'll work on it...

Eyjafjallajokull

2010-05-19T22:57:00.006+10:00

How cool is this video...

Well while Bangkok is burning, the smoke and ash comes out of the earth on the other side of the world. Though inconvenient for many Europeans but it looks much better than the smoke and stuff in Bangkok..

I'm worried about the political future of Thailand. Both sides of politics don't give any hope or peace of mind for the citizens. They have two choices of governments: a corrupted capitalist government that runs like a corporate, or the other one of corrupted old money which is rigid and doesn't do much either. All in all, the current crisis in Bangkok is the complete collapse of all levels of governments in Thailand since democracy was established in that country some 65 years ago. So sad....

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Jenny Holzer Exhibition

2010-01-11T12:54:00.006+11:00

Where could be better to take a friend from France to during the heatwave weekend in Melbourne? Somewhere cool, of course. Those in Europe and North America, it is possible that we are up to 40C warmer than you are! As my friend Antoine is a performer and he expressed an interest to see a show while he’s in Melbourne, I took him to the Melbourne art precinct. Just one trip, we got the Melbourne Concert Hall, Victorian Arts Center, the National Gallery of Victoria, the (former) Victorian College of the Arts, the new Melbourne Theatre Company (a borderline ugly building), the VCA Drama School (a REALLY horribly ugly building I couldn’t stress more), then Chunky Move and the Malthouse Theatre. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), the last 2 places were closed, so I just wandered about to ACCA building. Antoine just followed me.

And we weren’t disappointed. The wonderful ACCA, where admission is always free, is on the other side of the Uluru-like Chunky Move building (or the other way round.) The current exhibition is by Jenny Holzer whose works I’ve never seen before.

Holzer is from New York. In her website you’d see lost of projection works. You may say text projection as installation? Eh! I initially bypassed the text projection in Gallery 1 to something less flashy in Gallery 2. I was drawn to something that look like a blown-up A4-size documents on the wall. Looking closer, they’re reproductions emails correspondence, archives from US government department, hand prints and autopsy reports. All names in the blown-up documents were crossed of with black markers which in itself look striking. The anonymity within these extraordinary activities. What activities? The extraordinary rendition of during the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some documents are hand-written, some are handwriting filling in forms. The other side of the story to those Ariel or Times New Roman fonts of the goverment documents. The flesh and blood story of man inhumanity to man underneath the masking of the administrative protocol.

Looking even closer, the blown-up documents are actually paintings - oil on linen. But would you have a ‘painting’ of an autopsy report of an homicide of an Iraqi man on your wall? Then, why, Antoine asked, documents like these were exhibited in a gallery? Well, these paintings may not adorn anybody’s wall. But, I suppose, if art is to provoke thoughts, complex thoughts, to look at ourselves and the world around us, that’s what Holzer has done so successfully in such a seemingly simple way.

Not least a viscerally titled light emitting diode (LED) signs Torso. The whole exhibition made total sense to me after viewing this work for 1 second too long (I don’t want to say too much to spoil the conceptual zenith here.) Yes, in a complex way, I experienced the installations. I walked out of Gallery 2, viewing the hand print paintings again. The black markers on the paintings that crossed out names and identification of the finger/hand prints could now be read as the secrecy of all these rendition activities at the same time.

The text projection in Gallery 1 finished of the experience really well. Are things that happen in the world, that aren’t directly to us, just passing thoughts, rolling text on the wall? Or how we experience of life itself is like rolling text on the wall? It is definitely worth asking...

Jenny Holzer at ACCA

17 December 2009 - 28 February 2010

111 Sturt St, Southbank, Vic 3066

Admission free.

My first Boxing Day Test at the MCG...

2009-12-30T18:50:00.020+11:00

Click on the images for the panoramic view :)

the MCG in the morning as we arrived

The only 2 guys on the pitch are the opening batsmen Shane Watson (L) and Simon Katich (R). That's how big I could see them..

the G at tea..

I'm such a typical Melbournian that endlessly gushes about the MCG and threatens overseas visitors to bring them to a well-attended football or cricket match there...

I'm trying to take pictures of the G from our seats that impart the vastness the enclosed opening space. I bet the G rivals the Colosseum in Rome in size. Lucky for us, we don't come here to watch someone being eaten alive by lions anymore. Just awesome football or cricket matches.

I was there for the Boxing Day Test between Australia and Pakistan. It took a while for my eyes to get used to the human scale in the hollow ground. I was excited and anxious at the same time to see a the first wicket. We batted first and there's no wicket fallen til the afternoon.

Yes we spent the WHOLE day at the MCG and that's only the first day of the first Test! It's actually quite challenging to attend a sports match for the whole day. When I'm 70, I'll buy the 5-day pass for the boxing day Test.

These pictures look even better now that we won the boxing day Test by 170 runs. I like the Pakistani team a lot. They are a good team and have better manners than the Aussie in general. This cute 17-year-old Mohammad Aameer took 5 wickets, pretty impressive.

Thank you for reading my blogs.

Have a great 2010, hope it'll be a great exciting year for you all.

xxx

Christmas and garage sales...

2009-12-24T12:18:00.019+11:00

Holiday is boring, isn't it, but I couldn't go on without having one. Even when you go somewhere for holiday, it's work, it's not resting. I'm on holidays for 5 days now and it went as plan: I plan to do as little as possible. In other words, trying to be as lazy as possible. It's boring trying to be lazy. Then I read which is better, but I'm a slow reader and I can't sit for a long time. Then I lie down to read and of course I fall to sleep which makes my reading even slower.

On Saturday (19/12) after work I went to town , which was a silly idea indeed as the city was crazy, full of people shopping for christmas. I usually love shopping but I can't afford to do much of it lately. And shopping at this time of year feels depressing perhaps because brand new shiny things in department store are so overpriced and mass-produced. Politicians tell us as we shop, we do our bit to stimulate the economy - by buying things we don't need, hey? Ok, somebody may need something, but at a frantic pace? I amazed me how much stuff people buy for christmas, bags and bags each of them. They get in the way when you walk near those bags. Well, if they have children, they'd want something rather useless but expensive or big. I received lovely gifts myself from my clients and colleagues but at least they're not useless plastic stuff. They're small consumables which I can use, eat or drink...

We did a couple of garage sales which I enjoyed very much. We raised enough cash to pay for electricity and gas bills. There're a few highlights apart from our friends came over and we opened a bottle of wine (or two). All my friends are very good at hard selling which explained why we earned enough to cover the bills. When will the bills for electricity from renewable sources be cheaper? When will the government subsidise a solar panel for every household in Australia? The southern part of Australia is the prime location for wind farms - think about the reason why the Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race is the most dangerous yacht race in the world! It's extremely shameful that all electricity in this part of the world is not from the renewable sources by now.

It's all happening in there...

It's nice to see my old stuff (mostly clothing and books) went to people who appreciated and fascinated about them. Like a slinky silver dress I had for years but never wore them because it's too small went to this beautiful little girl who just grabbed it and asked her mum to put it on and never took it off. The dress once belonged to my ballet teacher in Bangkok. She wore the dress to one of the Rolling Stones concerts when she lived in London in the late 70s.

There's a lovely young lady who was looking for presents and asked me for advice (smart girl, she didn't go to the crazy shopping scene in the city mentioned above). I suggested her a set of Time Magazine Medical Manuals, a set of four books and she liked them and bought them! My thoughtful dad packed the Medical Manual in my suitcase before I headed off for Melbourne 15 years ago, just in case I got sick or had a bruise or burn. Poor dad, little did he know that I was off for good... or was I???

There's a guy who looked a bit like Matthew Hayden (the cricketer) looked at my stuff purposefully and grabbed my red embroidered skirt and a book called Albert Einstein's Ideas and Opinions. He did his garage sale shopping really quickly but, hey, he bought a skirt! I only assured him that if 'she' is my size and as short as me, it'd fit her. Interesting to see a man shopping for himself and his lady.

The Taiwanese girls next door told me Asian people prefer buying new things because they're superstitious that in old things, the spirits or energy of the former owners are still there. Funny, I'm Asian but I think it's nice to know the stuff I buy have been lovingly looked after by somebody before. I bought most of my favourite things from garage sales, secondhand and recycled shops.

Oscar and Mona came over for a drink and actually bought something. How very kind of them...

I reckon for christmas it's much more fun to buy and sell presents from garage sales than engage in that dizzy shopping scene in town. Think about how much carbon footprint we will reduce, how much less resource of the Planet Earth we're wasting, how much imagination we generate when we browse stuff at garage sales as oppose to consumerist stuff from department stores, how much more enjoyable it would be to know people we buy from or sell to, not to mention how much wine we drink with friends in the process, imagine the good cheer we have with friends and neighbours... and isn't that the point for the festive season?

Squeaky the cat minded the shop from afar..

PS: There's limitation to garage sales. It's more like cricket (which will be affected by the weather) than Aussie-rule football (which will be played rain, hail or shine.) For those in North America and Europe, perhaps wait until your weather calm down or in your summer. While the North Atlantic Great Conveyor Belt is still sort of functioning...

Who on this desperate Earth have voted Tony Abbott in the Parliament?!

2009-11-20T14:16:00.004+11:00

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2748161.htm

kiyomizu-dera

2009-11-17T23:59:00.003+11:00

kiyomizu-dera from Naree Vachananda on Vimeo.

Note: Please read the back story of this footage here.

Audition: an Undemocratic Exercise in Dance

2009-10-21T15:32:00.005+11:00

I recently had a conversation with a Belgian game designer who may have a vague interest in contemporary arts/dance. He said contemporary dance is when you're as lazy as possible?

That made me think. But from a dancer's point of view, the Belgian's statement point out something that ought to be fixed by us contemporary dance makers. We ought to know our stuff better. We ought to know the bits about movement and, equally, about non-movement, aural elements of our work too. We ought to know the substances of the moment when there's no movement. It's sad for me that in the 21st century, I came across an example of an archaic kind of creative process in a fully-funded project in a supposedly multi-cultural, democratic Australia.

Mind you, to be fair, people find it's tricky to just "observe" a body moving in a subtle way. They look at dance, they expect something you see in So You Think You Can Dance.

As I put in Satisfyin' Lover blog, that the perception of the Belgian is the reflection of dance as a notorious form of social/public arts. It's seen as a protective kind of art form, knowing well by those in the know (this could open up a different topic altogether!) But it also the reflection of the training process and creative process itself. For other performing art forms, the ideas, concepts or visions are perhaps communicated more clearly than dance. Perhaps actors or musicians are used to articulate those ideas and visions into their performance. Actors and musicians don't merely absorbing and executing the dialogues or pieces of music, respectively. They perform. They translate the notations into a performance. As a person with life experience performing that piece of dialogue or music.

I recently went to an dance audition, knowing that any audition is the most undemocratic, archaic environment of all creative places. In an audition, the artistic director or the choreographer is put in the position of power unavoidably. And he/she should be very well aware of that. And, as we're now proceeding well into the 21st century, he/she should do his/her best to avoid a dictatorial environment provide every dancer an equal opportunity to achieve tasks they are set to perform.

It's not possible for every dancer to be successful in an audition and still every dancer has a minute and a half to prove that they're worthy of performing the piece despite 25 years of dance training. And that sucks pretty badly.

In this particular audition, we dancers, were told that by the choreographer that she'd like to see us dancing first. Fair enough. So our first dance would be: "Move with any quality. Anything. Wood, metal, liquid, air."

Naree (N): "What's the quality of? Body or object?"
Choreographer (C): "Anything!"
N: (Think to herself) "I'll sort something out :/."

Second task was a verbal one. To tell the story about a person who may be important to us, made an impression on us or made us think about. We sat around in circle. I sat next to the choreographer, hence being the last one to tell the story.

Before the stories were told...

N: (asking C, trying to frame the task a bit more) "Anybody that we know or..?"
C: "Anybody!"

Everyone was trying to be meaningful, perhaps took the cue from the choreographer herself a humourless, meaningful type. By the time it's my turn, when the choreographer turned to me to listen to my story, she's already had a blank set of eyes. No sparks of creativity... Uh, oh!

So I told a story of a random old man in Minami-senju, a fairly seedy, poor area, north of Tokyo. It was just after midnight. I just finished having a beer or two at a small pub with friends. He's likely to finish having lots of beer with his friends. I was walking back to my hotel. He stopped me on my path and scolded at me in Japanese loudly for about 2 minutes or so. I looked at him and I saw this old man with hunched back, crooked leg, frail and very drunk. I thought at first to stay put in case he attacked me. So I thought to myself what to do if he attacked me. But then again, if I pushed him being old and frail, he'd definitely fall over backwards and cracked his head on the concrete pavement and died. And I'd be charged with murder. No, bad idea. Then when he had enough, he finished scolding and he let me go. I thought of him a lot that night. It's probably good that I didn't understand a word he said. A day or two later, I saw him again playing chess with a transvestite....

She certainly didn't get my story. Her eyes were even blanker to the abyss..

From that audition, I wish I didn't see young, well-trained, talented Australian dancers in the 21st century being wide-eyed, nodding their heads, asking few questions and as if willing to say, "Yes, commander, I'll do what I'm told." I know I was there out of curiosity and I believed that the dramaturg who was one of my favourite teachers would bring really good things out of this project. But he wasn't there during the audition. And we didn't even know what the show we're auditioning for was all about. I was plotting my way out of there half way through the audition.

To me, this audition wasn't even about master-student relationship. There's no vision, no imageries given, nothing to teach except those steps and a split (goodness me!), and, of course, nothing to learn.

I did the damned split by the way. Just because I can.

I was there because 9 years ago I did a really good audition that felt like a really good class. The vision was clear so the tasks set for dancers to execute were clear.

So perhaps, generally speaking, dancers in the Western culture are trained in the discipline of absorbing and executing steps, doing it like a dancer. In case of an audition (the example above was the bad end of the parameter) if you're injured or your body doesn't perform other people's ideosyncretic movement so easily as you wish and you're trying to figure it out, you're doomed, darling! Nobody has time for you. Nobody's interested in you as a person, just as a dancer. Don't you dare being a person!

No other art forms demeans their artists' creativity like the situation in an audition like that.

...Whereas an audition in theatre, the one I went 9 years ago, the director and the choreographer created the outline and us dancers were filling in to realise the vision. Then I felt like human, my creativity, along with other dancers', were acknowledged.

Then it reflects in general public that dancers have to execute amazing steps or they're worthless or nobody gets them at all. I think us dancers and dance makers in particular have some re-enforcement of our substances to do and we have to speak up about it. Then maybe the general public would look at us differently. They may start to observe our subtlety and aura, observing us as a person apart from our grande jete if we must put it in your piece. But that, my friends, is what us dancers need to work hard for.

Satisfyin' Lover: a Democratic Exercise in Dance...nani?

2009-10-20T11:21:00.012+11:00

I'm performing in a reconstruction of Steve Paxton's Satisfyin' Lover (c.1960s) this Saturday (Oct 24th). It's such a simple piece about walking, sitting, standing and, personally, about time. It's so simple that if one of the cast fails to arrive for some reason, we could pick someone on the street to replace the part. And that's, to me, precisely the point of the piece.

Many people who vaguely to moderately interested in dance may say pffff!, post-modern, schmost-modern! I remember a few years ago, for the Melbourne Festival, there's a visual arts installation about darkness that the gallery visitors walked into a dark room with nothing in it. Or worst, an installation that won a Turner Prize a few years back was about switching light on and off. It seems the conceptual kind of thing is more acceptable in visual arts or something, because if a dance show was that "conceptual", let alone an award, there would be no bums on seats. What's so interesting about people, walking, sitting and...what?...standing? See my point?

Perhaps this is a reflection of dance as a public/social art. But a part of this perception is also a reflection of dancers, dance training, the expectation of being dancers by dancers themselves, by choreographers who work with them and the general public.

The case in point of something, ..tut, tut.., so undemocratic is the process of dance audition. A traditional dance audition is where dancers are together in group, large or small, performing movements shown by choreographers at the best of their ability. The length of time a dancer has to prove her/himself depends on the size of the group and how much time the choreographer has. ..Mmmm...

For detailed information, read a separate blog for my experience on a recent audition I participated here.

For Mr Paxton, to say that he wouldn't agree with the process of audition is an understatement. As the forefather of contact improvisation, he refuses to manipulate other bodies with his own movement. Even one of his duet proved insufficiently democratic for his taste. He's well aware of all the context surrounding the presence of, in the case of his duet, two bodies in space for example, sexual equality in relation to the society, the positioning of the bodies, etc.

So in Satisfyin' Lover, a piece of around 25 - 40 performers, the score was originally published in Sally Banes' book Terpsichore in Sneakers. The score with a highlight of each part was given to us randomly. So my two parts was given to me randomly. I'm doing part number 14 and 34, don't forget to look out for me. In the rehearsal, there're people of different ages, sizes and genders. It's pretty much a democratic process in my book.

Further thought on democracy: it works when people involved in the democratic process are resourceful and knowledgeable...

I wish I could see Satisfyin' Lover, but I'm also interested in taking part in it. I can't have it both ways unfortunately. So come and witness a kind of democratic process in dance!...

A reconstruction of Steve Paxton's Satisfyin' Lover

5.30pm, Saturday October 24, 09

St Mary's Anglican Church Hall, 430 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

Free admission.

shibuya

2009-10-15T13:30:00.013+11:00

shibuya: a meditation on silence from Naree Vachananda on Vimeo.

There're hundreds of footage on the internet of this particular crossing in Shibuya, the Hachiko crossing. I'm one of those people who's mesmerised by it too. I'd like to know something more about it so I spent a few hours filming and selecting the edited footage as you see above.

I'm also try to make sense of this wave of people in relation to contact improvisation work I did with Shoko Kashima and Chico Katsube of C.I.co. + CIFJ. The mental and physical distance between people. Hopefully this visual/mental information I got from Shibuya would translate to my work with Shoko and Chico.

To read the article about Shinjuku and Shibuya on my website click here.

Enjoy!

Oh!, Warning! Loud noise used in the clip...

ueno park

2009-10-04T14:03:00.003+11:00

...and also the footage from an expedition at Ueno Park...

This clip is dedicated to the hardworking performers and buskers out there. I applaud you!

ueno park from Naree Vachananda on Vimeo.

harajuku

2009-10-03T18:06:00.002+10:00

checkout my new film clip of the footage from Harajuku, Tokyo.

harajuku from Naree Vachananda on Vimeo.

Omu Komachi

2009-09-18T20:32:00.008+10:00

The 10^th Udaka Seigan Noh Performance

September 13, 2009

Noh play: Omu Komachi (Komachi’s Parrot-answer Poem)

Author: Zeami Motokiyo

Shite: Ono-no-Komachi, performed by Udaka Michishige

This is no ordinary Noh play. For a start, it’s written by Zeami whose treatises on Noh are regarded as the finest of all writings in theatre. Then, it’s one of those roles that Noh actors don’t usually perform until in their sixties, that they have to reach certain calibre in a certain stage of their careers. So it’s such a special occasion.

So everyone on stage wore extra long hakama pants (they walked on their pants, basically) and matching vests with sort of winged shoulders. I discovered a beautiful thing about Noh music that the drummers who play otsuzumi (hip drum) and kotsuzumi (shoulder drum) with their amazing chanting represent the character of the shite (main actor). In this play, the leading role of Komachi is an old woman past her 100^th birthday, so the otsuzumi and kotsuzumi were played by two senior drummers. I think they understand the timing of Komachi better perhaps.

Before I go on, just a brief story of Omu Komachi: Poetry-loving Emperor Yozei (876-884) wasn’t’ happy with the quality of poetry he found around him. He remembered the name Ono-no-Komachi, once famous for her poetic genius, now an old woman of a hundred years old, living in poverty, begging on the streets on the outskirts of the capital. The Emperor sends Great Counsellor Yuki-ie with a poem to pay respect to Komachi. Unable to see well now, Komachi asked Yuki-ie to read the poem for her. After listening to the poem, Komachi changed one syllable of the poem to make a new poem, suprising Yuki-ie and in a way showing her mastery in poetry. That was pretty much the story!

My view to Omu-Komachi was an oh-so-minimal of a Noh, almost making something out of nothing! But the mastery of Zeami again lies in the time it takes to describe the most ordinary of a situation: a very old woman with a glorious past, now in a very old age and death is approaching. This is what Noh is all about. It’s the Buddhist philosophy imbued in this form of theatre. Nobody can escape death. The pace of the play was so slow I saw a few in the audience nodded their heads in agreement. For Udaka-sensei, an upright dazzling man in his sixties, to transform his gender and age to perform Komachi is utterly amazing to watch.

To me, Omu-Komachi is the simplest of a tale of mortality. The program notes described, quite literally, about the glory days of the young Komachi, her splendid poetry, her past lovers (she’s been around…for a long time…). Now it’s all gone. What is left is an old frail woman, just back from begging on the street when Counsellor Yuki-ie visited her. The silence of the situation of being old, the emptiness of time that she had in an old age, one can imagine, could never been better display here in this play of Zeami’s.

The program notes also described the ending just before Counsellor Yuki-ie left Komachi, “how the shadows lengthen, bringing the day to a close.” The farewell of Counsellor Yuki-ie was described by the chorus instead of a dialogue between the two, as if any conversation would not fit into such depth of silence. He quietly left Komachi. It’s her that had to deal with her mortality herself.

The most beautiful, touching moment was when Komachi performed a painfully slow dance in the end. The music stopped, the chorus stopped. Komachi slowly and quietly left the stage. Theatrically and philosophically, there’s nothing true to the situation than silence. I suppose that’s the mastery of Zeami who wrote it and Udaka-sensei to perform it.

That’s the hana moment alright. The most poignant of the play is also the simplest moment.

PS: Hana here means “flower”. It’s the analogy of the blooming a flower as the blooming of an actor in his youth with exuberance. It seems he can do anything with great energy. Soon the actor would lose his youthful energy but he has to develop his artistry to find the hana of a different kind. Zeami often refered to hana as the presence and intensity of the actor, the moment when the audience felt the true presence of the actor.

Acknowledgment: I am traveling to Japan with the financial support from the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts and its arts funding and advisory body, and Arts Network Asia www.artsnetworkasia.org, an enabling grant body, working across borders in multiple disciplines, that encourage collaboration initiated and implemented in Asia by Asian artists and Asian arts communities.

Daimonji Okuribi Noh - a Performance by Candlelight)

2009-08-17T11:13:00.004+10:00

Noh: "Aya-no-tsuzumi" (The Damask Drum)
August 16, 2009
The Kongo Nohgakudo, Kyoto.

Mind you, this is not a review on a Noh play,...who am I to do that?..., but a blog (of course) about an experience of watching the play live as a non-Japanese speaker.

You see, I've been in Japan for 2 weeks, traveling to Matsuyama for a week and been in Kyoto for just over a week or so. I get by with only 2 most spoken Japanese phrases: sumemasen and arigato gozaimashita! The phrases help enormously when I get lost, find ways around the city and bargain-hunt. But Noh is way beyond the language of words. It's like a meditation when you watch it.

I started my intensive Noh training 2 weeks ago with the Kongo Noh School in Kyoto and Matsuyama with Udaka Michishige-sensei and Rebecca Teele. Before the training, watching footage of a Noh play is an 'interesting', 'fascinating' experience with some questions like 'I'm wondering how can Noh tell different situations and places without changing scenaries an lighting?'. But from day 1 of the training, watching footage of a Noh play has made absolute sense to me. It seems to me that Noh was created with the clearest of the minds of the geniuses some 600 years ago. From my point of view, Noh training in chanting and dance requires absolute concentration that one can muster for it to work. Perhaps from then on, I watch Noh (at the Kongo Theatre or my fellow students practicing) at a different space from before training. Of course, the audience was given the program and the synopsis, yet there's an element of surprise and excitement of the moment when, say, the vengeful ghost of the Gardener enters the bridgeway (hashigakari).

Just briefly about "Aya-no-tsuzumi" (The Damask Drum). It's a story about an Old Gardener who falls in love with the Emperor's young, beautiful Consort. When the Consort learns about this, to make a point to him of the differences of their positions and the impossibility of any relationship between them, she sets him an impossible task: if he can beat a drum (tsuzumi) she sets up by the lake loudly enough for her to hear it from the palace, she'll meet him. The Gardener accepts the task gladly but later dissappointed then outraged that the drum is covered with damask so it makes no sound. Filled with despair and anger, the Gardener throws himself into the lake and drowns. In the last section of the play, the vengeful Ghost of the Gardener appears and berates the Consort. Menacingly, he demands her to beat the drum herself. The Ghost describes the horror of hell. Unrepentantly, he returns to the depth of the lake.

A Noh play has a certain structure and types of characters, please check out this fabulous site for detailed explanation http://www.the-noh.com/en/world/index.html. The portrayal of the characters and situations, emotions and places they're in is within this structure.

The sound of the chanting from the characters and the chorus was mesmerising. It wass carefully phrased and leaving time and space for something to happen. When the Gardener approached the drum, the chanting gradually became more dramatic, with incredible breadth and depth, signifying the expectation of the Gardener that the joy of being with the Consort would come after he beat the drum. But it's an amazing anti-climax as he beat the drum, no sound came out. The chanting and the action of the Gardener stopped completely, culminated at the point of silence and stillness. The moment took my breath away! Was this the "hana" (flower) moment that the Noh forefather Zeami Motokiyo was on about?

The space and time of the music before the last section simply created an expectation that something's going to happen. Then entered the big, elaborate Ghost of the Gardener with awesome mask and wig. He approached the Consort who sits quietly at the stool. If I were the Consort, how could I fight the enormity of the moment? She was melting away, got completely taken by the Ghost until he returned to the bottom of the lake. They exit the stage.

This went with the theme of the day of the performance. It's August 16, the day of the Daimon-ji Gozan Okuribi (bonfire festival) in Kyoto and Nara (http://gojapan.about.com/od/attractioninkyoto/a/gozanbonfirefes.htm). At around 8 pm, the bonfire was lit in a kanji character "dai" (means great) on the Higashiyama Nyoigatake Mountain in Sakyo-ku. It's the day of the spirits to return to their homes, wherever they may be. For the Ghost of the Gardener, he returns to where he belongs....